The EastAfrican OUTLOOK APRIL 25 - MAY 1, 2015 e -AF R ICAN 3 years after it fell apart, ‘Kony 2012’ may have finally changed the world Without that film, the≥e would a≥guably be no #Justicefo≥All By CAITLIN DEWEY Washington Post-Bloomberg A pril 20, 2012 was supposed to be the day the Internet changed the world. These were the early, optimistic days of “online activism,” and a little YouTube documentary called Kony 2012 had recently racked up 100 million views in less than a week. Buoyed by their own virality, and the belief that clicks could actually count for something, the non-profit behind the video planned a global rally unlike any the world had ever seen. On April 20, they promised, thousands of protesters would gather in global cities for an event called Cover the Night, plastering awareness materials on bridges and telephone poles and demanding justice for the Ugandans who had suffered at the hands of longtime warlord Joseph Kony. But in LA, three people showed up. In New York and Sydney, the turnout was much the same. On April 21, the day after the day the Internet was supposed to change the world, supporters and critics of the Kony campaign woke with the conviction that “online activism” just didn’t add up. “A Kony wristband woven together by fairies out of rainbows and unicorn hair (doesn’t) magically change the destiny of Africa every time a white person buys one on the Internet,” snarked comedian Aamer Rahman during one on-stage performance. He wore a sweatshirt that said “Do the Right Thing”: presumably, anything besides repost that ubiquitous video when an issue like Kony transcends the news and becomes a marker of identity. On social media, of course, that now happens all the time: Every #YesAllWomen and #BlackLivesMatter declares who we are, what we stand for personally. It is so easy to forget that wasn’t always the case — that in fact Kony, the “most viral video of all time,” was the first deployment of this thing we are now calling “emergent opinion-based social identity.” By most measures, of course, Kony 2012 was a flop. While Thomas’s research found that many supporters of the campaign did take real-life action, and while those petitions and phone calls did result in renewed commitments from the US government and the United Nations, Kony has still not been captured. The campaign against him also suffered, infamously, from questions about its motives and its funding; the non-profit behind it, which never recovered from the fallout, has said it expects to close permanently this year. Was a success And yet, in the sense that Facebook campaign as part of the online activism or send yet another #StopKony tweet. In the three years since then, of course, the reputation of online activism — also known, dismissively, as slacktivism, clicktivism and hashtag activism — has not improved much. Cynics sighed, huffed and The least unacceptable response to suffering is to speak out against it.” Umeme senior spokesperson eye-rolled through the rise of #BringBackOurGirls, a campaign that (as we now know) did not actually return 250 Nigerian schoolgirls to their families. The Internet promptly picked up and dropped a number of other causes, from the treatment of women to the depiction of Asian-Americans on TV. For every movement and hashtag that has come after, the April 20 implosion of Kony 2012 is a critical touchstone — a particularly epic failure for doubters to gesture toward. And yet, even as we question new online movements, the lega- cy of Kony 2012 is subtly changing. “Kony 2012 was criticised for its failure to achieve its stated policy objective and generate significant offline action,” summed one recent paper in the European Journal of Social Psychology. But Kony did succeed in other things: Like getting millions of people, from different countries and backgrounds, to unite around someone else’s distant suffering. In academic terms, research- ers call this an “emergent opinion-based social identity” — a bit of jargon that is actually worth understanding, given its huge implications for everything from Kony to #BlackLivesMatter to the tea party. See, as the social psycholo- gist Emma Thomas and several co-authors explain in that recent journal article, the way we see ourselves is really central to how (and whether) we pursue social change. You wouldn’t be surprised to see hardcore vegetarians campaigning for animal rights, or avowed feminists fighting abortion laws — for them, the political is personal. These issues lie at the heart of their pre-existing identities. It is really tricky, however, to persuade people to care about things that have nothing to do with them. The average person encounters thousands of injustices every week, but most of these injustices are (a) insurmountable or (b) really, really far from home. Between the powerlessness, the distance and the sheer number of tragedies in which someone (anyone!) should intervene, it is impossible to get eyeballs on an obscure humanrights issue like the reign of Kony. The exception, Thomas and her colleagues write, is Kony 2012 served as a social model for every online movement that came after — many of which would actually change the world — Kony was a success. Without it, there would arguably be no #BlackLivesMatter or #JusticeforAll. We would not see our personal involvement and identification with these hashtags the same way. Recently, Princeton sociolo- gist Timothy Recuber delivered a lecture in New York on the efficacy of activism in the social media age. He has coined an intriguing new term, “infoguilt,” to define the self-loathing social media users commonly feel when they see bad news online and don’t repost it. Was there infoguilt before Kony? If so, I don’t remember it. But there is now “a new cultural consensus,” Recuber said: “The least unacceptable response to suffering is to speak out against it.” Caitlin Dewey writes The Post’s Intersect web channel, covering digital and Internet culture. Phone came≥as and apps help captu≥e police b≥utality, call fo≥ ≥efo≥ms A JOINT REPORT New York Times THE VIDEO of the fatal shooting of an unarmed black man by a white police officer in South Carolina is seen by some advocates of police reform as evidence of the rising power of technological weapons in their fight. That includes the smartphone camera, and with it, a growing number of apps produced by activists that streamline the process of capturing and broadcasting videos of police interacting with citizens. “A lot of times, until these vid- eos show up, the officer is going to walk,” said Darren Baptiste, the creator of Cop Watch, an iPhone app that automatically begins recording when you tap its icon and automatically uploads the video to YouTube when the recording is stopped. Baptiste, 47, is an app devel- oper in Toronto, where several episodes of force by police — some of them eventually deemed unlawful — have been captured by citizens wielding cameras over the past few years. He said that when photographing the police during intense situations, people often get flustered — they may forget to hit record, or may not know how, or where, to upload a video. There have also been cases in which police, sometimes in violation of the law, confiscated cameras or phones containing stored recordings. The app, which Baptiste created with the Network for the Elimination of Police Violence, an advocacy group based in Toronto, is meant to make recording the police easier and to make the footage less vulnerable to confiscation by the authorities. Once a user uploads a video, the group is notified, and its staff can review and, if necessary, alert the news media and authorities of any apparent wrongdoing by police. Citizen-captured video Though it is only the latest in a string of cases in which amateur photography has been used to document officers’ use of force, the South Carolina shooting demonstrates the power of citizen-captured video in the most salient way. Michael T. Slager, the officer in the case, initially said that Walter L. Scott, a driver who had been stopped for a broken taillight, had taken his stun gun during a scuffle. The video, captured on a cellphone by a bystander, instead showed the officer shooting Scott eight times while he ran away. Slager has been charged with murder. Cop Watch is one of a number of programmes for smartphones aimed at helping citizens broadcast encounters with the police. By Farhad Manjoo and Mike Isaac New York Times Service 37